I'm really proud that so far no one has argued about any point I make in the article, but rather about the "cancer" reference and the swearing at the end. I guess that means I happened to write a pretty damn good article.
I believe there are plenty of problems with the points of view expressed in your original post. Not the least of which is that the Rails community was built with carefully crafted factional mentality. People called it "opinionated" software and if you didn't like it, well, "F*ck you."
This is how Rails was marketed, by splitting people into camps: Us (cool, indie hackers) vs. Them (corporate stiffs). Fervent conflict was intentionally built into the Rails culture from the very start and complaining about it at this point seems slightly after the fact.
Which leads me to my next issue: the Pareto rule. This seems like a silly thing to be complaining about because it's also the reason that there are four revisions of the Rails book and countless other money-makers (books, confs, Peepcodes, etc).
I'm sure you can see why congratulating yourself may seem a little arrogant and perhaps give people the wrong impression of your "cancer-ridden" community.
Please, explain to me the difference between "following trends blindly" and "learning from older developers' experience"?
Because both of them look remarkably like cargo-culting appeals to authority.
Folks constantly rant about the reinvention of the wheel, but i think they're missing the point. Everyone talks about how wonderful it is that digital and web-based technologies allow for rapid prototyping and failing fast which in turn results in the ability to experiment.
And then they turn around and criticize people for experimenting accusing them of not learning from their elders or whatever. Learning is a process. You learn by doing. Even if you have to rediscover what other folks have discovered in the past.
Experimenting is good. I do it all the time. Just take a look at my repos on Github. Just a few of them are conceptually (and arguably) "new", while the others are just exercises to learn about new things. Experimenting about things, even about the basic ones, helps me a lot in my learning process. At a personal level.
But when you watch the bigger picture, with companies actually building software for clients that trust them, then choosing technology is a delicate, non-trivial matter. It's important, and I mean in actual dollars (or euros). There is where the expertise of older developers, people who have founded, sold or shut down profitable and unprofitable companies, who have worked in a gazilion of projects and made a lot of expensive mistakes, there is where that expertise comes to play. They can enlighten the sometimes childish, faction-like debates about technology that keep repeating themselves over and over. That can free us to think about new problems and new things, based on past experience. That's how science advances, and that's how software development advances too, in my opinion.
